The Second, Second Try

These are the kitchen items that I have lacked the past three days and had to make do with typical megan-ghetto-style inventions: a mortar, a food processer, a meat mallet, and a rolling pin.

Last night I made pork chops and zucchini with cilantro & cream. And scotch-er-oos. What? They were in my fancy cookbook. We'll not discuss the chops at this time. Remember, this blog is a happy place.

Christmas Eve was oven-roasted ribs with homemade dry rub and homemade barbecue sauce with fennel-roasted vegetables (the fennel was not homemade—God made the fennel. Credit where credit’s due.). I know what you're thinking. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking EWW Megan! Fennel!? Yucky little seeds! But those little seeds didn’t yuck it up at all. BTW, if you lack a mortar, do NOT try to crush these by putting them on a cutting board and whacking them with a hammer. This simply results in fennel seed bullets flying all over the kitchen. Instead, take your husband’s nice, heavy hammer, put the seeds in a Ziploc baggie, take them out onto your cement patio, place them on the concrete next to the cooler you forgot to put away from the late part of the summer when you had people over for a neighborhood cookout, and whack them with almost all your might. In order to turn fennel seeds into fennel seed dust without a mortar, you’ve gotta put some stank on it.

Fennel, in the raw, looks like this:

Pretty unimpressive, huh? Like celery that just couldn't cut it in show biz. But I didn't even use the leafy part, just the bulb at the bottom.

The recipe for the ribs, bbq sauce and rub are below. If you’re one of “those people” who thinks that a grill is the only legitimate way to cook ribs, you’re missing out. Big time.
 

Quickly, I have more observations:

1.       You have to reserve a nice sized block of mental fortitude just to push through the kitchen clean-up process after a long afternoon of cooking.

2.      A garbage bowl is sort of a necessity, so you don’t have to keep opening the garbage can. Just dump your junk in the bowl as you go, grinds, rinds, peels, seeds, skins, stalks and the like, and dump it all at the end. Mental note—compost this junk in the spring.

3.      Baked goods making sizzling sounds is almost never a good thing.

4.      Rise of the Planet of the Apes stunk. We watched it after dinner. No bueno.

My ribs before. In they go...weeeeee....

My ribs after:

My ribs after, after:

These are the fennel-roasted veggies. Pretty, huh?

Oven Roasted Ribs
The Rub:
6 tablespoons light or dark brown sugar
6 tablespoons paprika
3 tablespoons garlic powder
3 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper
1 ½ teaspoons salt, plus more to sprinkle on the ribs
2 teaspoons liquid smoke (optional and I didn’t use it)
½ cup plus 1 tablespoon Dijon or yellow mustard. I used yellow.
4 slabs baby back ribs or 3 slabs spareribs
Barbecue sauce (recipe to follow)


The method:
Adjust one oven rack to the low position and remove the other rack. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees. Mix a dry rub of brown sugar, paprika, garlic powder, pepper and 1 ½ teaspoons salt in a bowl. If you’re using liquid smoke, mix it with the mustard.

Lay the ribs directly on the removed oven rack and lightly sprinkle them with the salt. Brush both sides of each slab with mustard, then sprinkle them with the dry rub.

Line a large rectangular cookie sheet or jelly roll pan with a large sheet of heavy-duty aluminum foil, extending the foil out to make sure you catch all the drippings from the ribs. Put the rack with the ribs into the upper-middle position and place the foil-lined pan on the lower oven rack. Roast the ribs until fork-tender, 1 ½ to 2 hours for baby back ribs (which is what I made) or 2-3 hours or longer for spareribs.

Remove the ribs from the oven and gently brush on the barbecue sauce. Put the ribs back in the oven and turn on the broiler. Broil for 5 minutes per side.  Enjoy!

Homemade BBQ Sauce:
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter
¼ c. red wine vinegar
¼ c. ketchup
¼ c. fresh lemon juice
¼ c. Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoonTabasco sauce to taste (while I consider our family chile heads, I cut the heat in half so my sons could eat it without guzzling water, so ½ tablespoon Tabasco)
¼ teaspoon garlic powder
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

The method:
Melt the butter in a small saucepan. Stir in the remaining ingredients and bring to a boil. Serve warm.

NOTEWORTHY:
1. Baby back slabs weigh about 1 1/2 lbs.
2. When you're seasoning the ribs, you can save yourself a big mess by putting a layer of newspaper under the rack they're sitting on. That way you can just roll it up and dump it. 
3. Don't worry that the oven rack will be hard to clean. Because the heat stays so low in the oven, nothing gets baked on tenaciously. The rack just needs warm, soapy water to loosen the clinging pieces.